Homicidal violence in Honduras: the institucional cases of Keyla Martínez (2021) and Wilson P´érez (2022)

Abstract

Violence is positioned as a historical and social phenomenon present in the human experience, which is shown as a power device that regulates reality and the limits of what is socially established, especially in contexts where institutions are weak and inefficient to regulate it, contributing to the breakdown of the rule of law.

While the forms and levels of violence may vary from one context to another, homicide has become a universal indicator that impacts as an inescapable reality in every society, finding in the youth its main victim, a situation that is not alien to the Honduran context where daily examples were sought to observe how the justice system operates in the face of crime and what is the capacity of institutional response.

Thus, explanatory conditions for violence converge in the country, among which the institutional factor stands out, identified through two emblematic case studies that respond to a qualitative methodology, whose review of bibliographic sources on news coverage followed a chronological order, where violence and the use of force are observed as the instrument and method to manage the conflict in the midst of police and judicial imperfection that exacerbate the levels of violence in a precarious society in which human rights are constantly violated and there is a notable loss of citizen freedoms, before a legal, institutional and normative system in which justice is not constituted as a right other than privilege.